Sunday, December 29, 2013

Good Morning Jessicca...

Letter to my Daughter

Sunday, 29 December

I was here

Good Morning Jessicca…

How do we not be young?
We stop being vigorous and optimistic.
I can’t imagine anything good about that. At some point a person is forced to
physically slow down because of age but it doesn’t mean we have to lag in
spirit. Creaking joints, though, is no
reason for loss of optimism. I think a
pessimistic view of life is irrational because it ignores the big picture. What remarkable energy there is in
people. This is obvious. We have an absolutely unrelenting
constitution for making things happen. How
could this world be in the state that it is if we were otherwise? People of all persuasions desire to improve
upon the world as they see best. We are
all in competition to produce a better system in which we can all live. Often things don’t go our way and that’s not
necessarily bad. It requires us to
rethink what it is we are trying to do and why it is others may not agree with
our ideas on creating a more perfect world.
We probably don’t change our minds on goals but we do adjust and push
ahead if we are to remain in the race.

Life can get brutal but people are tough. We don’t mind picking a fight with the big
guy if we believe we are right. It’s
happened time and again. The Americans thumbed
their nose at the British when England was on top a couple of hundred years
back and the Americans got away with it, thanks to some timely help from the
French. The Cubans and Vietnamese have,
in turn, thumbed their nose at us, as well.
They also relied on needed support from our adversaries but it is
remarkable, none the less, that these scrawny little countries should dare to
cross Uncle Sam when he was positively bristling with weapons. People will consistently put their lives on
the line when they believe they are right.
This is a very courageous characteristic of humans. It is something about human nature that
deserves our respect.

Of course, people with an opposing view don’t suddenly back
down when they run across stiff resistance.
That isn’t in our nature, as you can well see. But being the dominant force is all the more
reason to consider what it is about us that makes the other side so fired up
mad. Why not pause to review our actions
in an effort to be more constructive, more accommodating to other points of
view? After all, if we are the big guy
in the right then wouldn’t you think time was on our side anyway? What’s the rush to herd people to our point
of view? People with evangelical ideas
on how the world should be can show impatience, bordering on deafness, when it comes
to hearing out those with contrasting ideas.
The mighty often get their way in the short term but it doesn’t make for
being right. People have a habit of steadily
subverting the power of the arrogant.
They’ll risk a trip to the hospital, or worse, just for the chance of
kicking you in the shin. Insult and
offend enough people and you find yourself suddenly a giant among the Lilliputians
- prostrate and powerless, strapped to the ground. No one stays king of the mountain against the
will of the world’s vast number of meek.

I am one among the countless billions inhabiting this
planet. We have dominion over the Earth,
for better or worse. We squabble with
ourselves, and sometimes come to blows, over how we divvy up the world’s
treasure. We often don’t mind taking
more than our fair share. Why is
that? Is there something wrong with our
philosophy? Is it about socialism versus
capitalism? Could it be that nationalism
makes for artificial distinctions among people?
Are we about tribes? Are we about
family? Do we discover spiritual oneness
on our daily commute?

I was talking earlier about living with vitality. We build and plan and care about people we
love and it somehow all seems to work out for us on a broad scale. Our individual internal conflicts are not enough
to divert most of us from attempting to achieve our own sense of mission
accomplished. Every human accomplishment
of every description has its basis in the will to complete something, to
contribute something of oneself. Here’s
my mark. I was here. I’ve now left my indelible scratch somewhere in
the history of ‘Once upon a time’.